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Compiere
www.compiere.com

Compiere is an Open Source ERP application with integrated CRM functionality. It can be installed in just about an hour. However, you will have to shell out money for buying an Oracle database and recruiting an ERP and Oracle expert to implement it.

The core ERP modules include General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, Order Entry and Job Cost. It also has a Customer Account module to maintain your customer details along with the feedback. This simplifies your order processing and POS (Point-of-Sales) customer commerce and care, manage your inventory, automate accounting and provide customer service.

To implement it, give a demo username GardenUser and password GardenUser and click on the Tick button. By default this demo user is authorized to HQ (Head Quarters) and store only. You can add more users and assign them roles or departments. Click on the Tick and you will get Java-based interface running the Compiere ERP & CRM solution. On left, you will see all the defined automated business process modules. As an an example, if you want to create an invoice for a customer, from Compiere's interface, select 'Quote-to-Invoice'. Under this you will see number of invoice modules.

Double-click on Invoice Customer to get the performa of a customer invoice. Here fill in the details and the transaction will be automatically percolated in the sales book. Apart from demo, you can create your own workflow and business rules, and use the same as an ERP & CRM solution for your small to mid-sized businesses.

BrowserCRM is a Web-based CRM, groupware and e-mail solution. It's meant for small to medium businesses and integrates CRM, e-mail, task scheduling, calendaring, online group discussions and invoicing.

The CRM modules include a full fledged contact-management system. This can import data from most of your existing CRM applications including ACT!, Goldmine, Maximiser, Outlook, SalesForce and SugarCRM. You can even export the contact data to other applications in multiple file formats including CSV, TXT, HTML, DHTML and XML. You can store data in hierarchical format. It also lets you track and evaluate sales opportunities.

To install, you just need to configure Apache with PHP and MySQL and the rest can be done from its Web interface. On the flip side, it has no reporting toolsunlike others we have evaluated. You can access it from a Web browser by entering the default username and password that you have set during the set-up process. The admin homepage has links for creating contacts, appointments, tasks, opportunities, mail, memo and documents on its leftand links for creating new admin and normal users on the right. You can set the company preferences like time zone, default rights for groups and users, etc from here. BrowerCRM has a comprehensive search feature, wherein you can find contacts by company name, by designation and by phone number. You can allow different departments to search for contact information from within or outside the groups.

Apart from contacts, you can search through appointments, tasks, memos as well as documents.

SugarCRM has both commercial as well as Open Source solutions available. The Open Source version is called Suger Open Source, whereas the licensed versios are called Sugar Professional and Enterprise. The licensed versions are available as both hosted and onsite solutios. The software is meant for companies of all sizes. It provides integrated management of corporate information on contacts and accounts, sales leads and opportunities, plus activities such as phone calls, meetings and assignments.

The Sugar suite offers point-and-click capabilities for user-interface customization.This allows you to change the CRM according to your requirements. It is very easy to install. When you open the SugarCRM interface from a Web browser for the first time, it takes you to the process of installing and configuring the solution for you.

For testing, it also provides you with the demo data so that you can play around with it before actually implementing it. We used its Windows version. While using this CRM, we observed that it takes some time to open its Web page for the first time and after that it refreshes fast.

SugarCRM's main interface is quite neat and easy to use. There are eight links on it--Home, Activities, Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases and Dashboard. Here, the Home tab provides a general overview of current appointments, top opportunities, pending tasks, open cases, open leads and sales pipeline graph. It also includes shortcuts to enter data such as contacts, accounts and task. Overall, we found this package pretty easy to install.

vtiger CRM is an Open Source CRM solution meant for small and medium businesses. Its features include Lead Management, Opportunity Management, Account & Contact Management, and Reports & Dashboards specifically useful for your organization's sales team. You can also use other sales force automation related modules, such as Activity Management (including Calendaring), Product Management, Inventory Management, File Attachments and others.

Being a module-based CRM, you can designate each module to a specific group. For example, a salesperson will only be able to access the SFA module while rest of the modules will be hidden. It also has add-on, for Outlook users, which enhances the user experience by reducing the unnecessary duplication of work while communicating with customers. This is the only CRM that we have evaluated that has Apache with PHP and MySQL in its installer. While installing this solution, you will be asked to use your existing Apache or its built-in Apache setup to configure the Apache Web server. Overall the installation is very easy.

It has very good GUI reporting tool, which analyzes the data in the database and shows you the projection in graphs. For example, if you want to know the account-wise sales, it will show you a bar chart with account-wise sales figures.

To use vtiger, open a Web browser and type in the IP address of CRM machine with port 81. On its interface, give the admin as the username as admin as the password. It will open the interface with dashboard key notes of your pending events, upcoming events, top accounts etc. It keeps you updated about your overall CRM activities.